Outgoing independent Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has spent her final months in office missing votes, tanking a union-friendly National Labor Relations Board, and praising the obstructionist procedure known as the filibuster.
She has also violated campaign finance law by taking pricey trips to places like Rome and California wine country, according to a Wednesday complaint lodged by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
The group claims that since Sinema announced in March that she would not run for reelection, her campaign has spent over $100,000 on personal travel expenses. Those expenses do not appear to have any connection to campaign or official duties, making them illegal uses of her funds, CREW says. (Sinema’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)
“The law applies to you whether it’s your first week in office or your last.”
She has successfully fought off similar charges before by claiming that the expenses were related to fundraising, but that could be a tougher sell this time around given her departure from the Senate.
Noah Bookbinder, the president of CREW, said it was particularly concerning that Sinema was still trotting the globe during her lame-duck period.
“The law applies to you whether it’s your first week in office or your last,” Bookbinder said in a statement. “Spending thousands of dollars of campaign contributions on yourself is even more troubling when it comes after you’ve announced you’re no longer a candidate.”
Racking Up Miles
Sinema’s campaign organization has not raised any money in the last two quarters since she announced her departure from the Senate, but fundraising from past years has left her with nearly $5 million in cash on hand, as of her latest Federal Election Commission report.
That has given her campaign plenty of money for a globe-spanning spending spree.
The expenses, according to the CREW complaint, include trips to various locations spread across several months that include:
- $3,120 to vendors in Italy in March, including a hotel in Milan and a restaurant steps from the Pantheon in Rome
- Nearly $9,000 to vendors in Massachusetts around the time of the Boston Marathon in April, which Sinema, a fitness buff, has participated in before
- $15,000 of spending in California and Colorado over the summer in locations that included Three Sticks Wines, a winery where Sinema has both interned and courted private equity donors
- $82,000 in a grab bag of travel expenses this year that include $3,600 in the United Kingdom and $5,400 in France, including $2,800 at the Castel de Très Girard in the wine region of Burgundy
CREW said that despite “an extensive search of the public record,” it was unable to find evidence that the expenses related to official congressional duties or to campaign activities.
It would be perfectly legal for a member of Congress to use their campaign money to host fundraising events or to finance excursions nominally related to their job — but there is no evidence that Sinema has been engaging in either, CREW says.
“It’s hard to see how any of this spending was for the benefit of the campaign.”
The FEC’s test of whether a particular expense violates the law is straightforward: For every expense, the commission asks whether the candidate would have dished out the money irrespective of being a politician. If they would have paid the money even if they were not a member of Congress trying to drum up donations or make official visits, the expense is no good.
To CREW, the spending outlined in its complaint is a clear violation.
“The rule of thumb is that any dollar your campaign spends has to be for the campaign — it can’t just be for your own personal benefit,” Bookbinder said. “It’s hard to see how any of this spending was for the benefit of the campaign.”
No Punishment Before
While Sinema did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept, or one weeks before from the Arizona Republic, the outcome of a similar complaint filed last year shows how reticent the FEC has been to take action against her before.
In May 2023, Change for Arizona 2024 PAC, a group opposed to Sinema, filed a complaint alleging that a whirlwind of previous spending on trips to places like Boulder, Colorado, and Boston violated the law.
Sinema argued successfully that many of the trips coincided with fundraising junkets. Some were also paid for by the Sinema-affiliated Getting Stuff Done PAC, a separate organization known as a leadership PAC that has more leeway to cover her personal expenses. The FEC voted to dismiss the 2023 complaint against Sinema this September.
Critics of the FEC say that it too often punts on taking action against politicians who violate the law, and that when it does, the punishment is too late and too light to matter.
By the time CREW’s complaint is resolved, Sinema could be long gone from the Senate. She has previously mused, according to a biography of her friend Mitt Romney, about serving on a board or as a university president in her post-Senate life.
Although Sinema has missed some of the most votes of any senator during this Congress, that has not stopped her from making news during her final weeks.
In her first Senate vote since before Thanksgiving, Sinema helped tank a Democratic appointee to the National Labor Relations Board who could have kept its pro-union members in the majority through 2026.
“It is deeply disappointing, a direct attack on working people, and incredibly troubling that this highly qualified nominee — with a proven track record of protecting worker rights — did not have the votes,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote.
Sinema left the Democratic Party in 2022 to become an independent, after helping kill one of organized labor’s top priorities, a law that would have made it easier to unionize workplaces.
